Watching Shirley Temple's performances now can be discomfiting, but in her
time and in her way she liberated women

Watching Shirley Temple with the eyes of a modern adult can be a strange experience. Take her performance of “On the Good Ship Lollipop”, from the film Bright Eyes (1934), in which the six-year-old Temple entertains a train carriage full of grown men, who lift her on to their laps, hold her aloft by her thighs and feed her sweets. How are we to read that scene now? Or watch her tap dances, in any number of movies, with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the first black man to appear onscreen with a white child. The formula is blackface, even if the practice is not, and cheerful though the protagonists are, viewing can be uncomfortable.

The thing to remember is that at the time she became a star, Shirley Temple was herself something of a revolution – not in terms of race or gender relations, maybe, but because of her age. Her bouncing curls, her chubby chin and baby voice were authentic, and that meant something. The fact that she was a real child who played a child her own age was a watershed emphasised by the number of films she remade whose starring roles had been originally been performed by Mary Pickford.

If we are used to worrying, now, about children looking too grown-up (take the terrifying spectacle of the tiny murdered beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey), in those days in Hollywood women were imprisoned by something like the reverse. They were made up to look like young girls – and that had its offensive side too. For years before Temple came along, actresses performed in a kind of drag, cross-dressing to another age bracket.

Mary Pickford was known as “America’s Sweetheart” for years, and try as she might to play adults in the movies, she was always forced back into little girl roles. Poor Little Rich Girl, The Little Princess and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (all 1917) which Pickford made when she was 25, were recast with a real child in the shape of Shirley Temple twenty years later. It didn't matter that Pickford was famously married to the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks, or that she and Fairbanks founded the United Artists film studio with Charlie Chaplin and DW Griffith in 1919. It wasn’t until she cut off her locks and made her first talkie that Pickford was really accepted by the movie-going public as a grown woman. That was in 1929; she was 37 years old.

Shirley Temple, by contrast, wasn’t pretending to be anything other than what she was. So even though some of her performances can seem to walk a political tightrope now, and even if her “cuteness” itself feels a little dated, we should remember that in her way, she was a liberation.